Our activities are touched by the situation with COVID. Of course, we continue to honor simulation requests the best we can meanwhile.

However, all workshops, seminars and conferences have been canceled since March, and still at the time of writing these lines. Therefore, no conference will be attended before Oct. 2020, at minimum.

List of seminars affected by the reduction of gathering activities.

• Postponed to 2021 – High Power Laser Ablation conference, Santa Fe (USA).
• Canceled – Visit at University of California, Merced (USA).
• Postponed – 1 month stay at University of Mendoza (Argentina) for Atlantic project.
• Postponed – Invited talk at the Advanced Lasers Technologies conference, Bordeaux (France).
• Remote – 2 invited talks in Ultrafast Light 2020, Moscow (Russia).

We hope that the crisis will be resolved soon, enabling a smooth return to scientific exchanges.

Following our publication on highly-regular periodic surface structures in metals, a fruitful collaboration driven by Dr. Petr Kovaricek (UCT Prague), Dr. Inam Mirza (HiLASE FZU Prague) and prof. N. M. Bulgakova (HiLASE FZU Prague) was born and was recently published in Nano Research (Springer), IF 8.5.

I’m happy to have contributed to the numerical simulation part using a phenomenological model we have developed in the frame of MSCA “QuantumLaP” project.

Manuscript can be found behind paywall here.

Active discussion at the NVIDIA IT4I event (Ostrava)

In the context of the Marie Curie ATLANTIC project, I could benefit from 2 days training in CUDA and OpenACC. This knowledge is today essential for harvesting the power of high power computers nowadays. Pictures of the event are available here.

Group picture with other attendees of the school.

I have accepted to seat as an associate editor of Optics Express (Optical Society of America). I’m happy to start having editorial activities.

Tweet from the Optical Society of America is available here.

It seems the news may be also available in Optics and Photonics News of January 2020.

• Participants of the Marie Curie project “ATLANTIC” (work packages 3 and 5) stayed one month at HiLASE in September. Assoc. prof. Usman Sapaev and Dr. Sergey Starinskiy both performed an invited HiLASE seminar and presented invited oral presentation at the conference ALT19 (Advanced Laser Technologies).
• The computational time offered by PRACE (HPC project DECI15th “BOLERO”) is now accessible. Certifications by FZU are sufficient to access the resources.
• T. Derrien presented an invited talk at the ALT19 conference on the long standing works on transient excitation of electrons in solids.

The BOLERO PRACE project for high power computation (HPC) has been accepted. Therefore, we got 2.6 million core-hours on top of our resources for 2019-2020.

This will support the heavy computations we run using time-dependent density functional theory at HiLASE RP4 for making predictions in the field of laser processing, and for the ATLANTIC project.

It was an honor to be invited by prof. Yabana and Dr. Otobe to the Kansai Photon Institute in Japan for having an excellent workshop there and visiting Kyoto and Nara, the former capital cities of Japan.
Title of the seminar was “Predicting laser surface nanostructuringusing dispersion laws in the complex plane.”

On June 19th, TJY Derrien was honored to present a seminar in the group of Prof. Ishikawa (University of Tokyo).
Title was: “Predictive modeling of materials excitation, melting and nanostructuring upon femtosecond laser irradiation: first-principle and phenomenological perspectives”.
Duration of the talk was 1h. Here is the link to the official announcement.

Questions from the inviting professors were accurate and numerous.

The project IT4I/MORILLE has been granted. It consists in providing a computational time of 3.5 M core-hours to implement the Marie Curie ATLANTIC project we obtained with HiLASE and with a number of partners. The PI is Dr T. J.-Y. Derrien, and the project includes the training of several people at HiLASE, plus the hosting of the incoming researchers of the ATLANTIC project.

Thanks to this project, HiLASE has now access to all the scales of machines that are necessary to prepare efficient HPC simulation codes.

• BIATRI-SRV to prepare codes for shared memory architectures (OpenMP).
• MetaCentrum to prepare codes for distributed memory architectures (MPI) and GPU simulation.
• IT4I to execute codes on distributed memory architectures and GPUs.

The Marie Curie project ATLANTIC has now its own website: http://www.atlantic-rise.eu/

QuantumLaP.eu has nicely provided the software frame for the project starting. The management, the project info and the mailing lists are from now transferred to the new official website.